Tech | Steve Woods

Another solicitor uses Google Translate as no interpreter shows up in court

12/04/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Tech

I received the following message from a solicitor on 10th April 2013:

“I represented a Latvian national yesterday and today in Haverfordwest Magistrates. He was produced in custody yesterday morning. His English was limited. No Latvian interpreter could be found, the DJ remanded him over night “insufficient info” until today for interpreter to be sorted. 3.00pm today we conclude the case, no interpreter, I did the hearing at the same time as typing into Google translate! The alternative would have been further depravation [sic] of his liberty (he was fined £205 including surcharge and costs for the offences before the court).”

A good example of what price competitive tendering does to the quality of a service!

This is a repost from Linguist Lounge.
LibreOffice 3.6.6 released today

11/04/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

The blog of The Document Foundation, the German foundation behind LibreOffice, announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.6, the free and open source office suite for Windows, MacOS and Linux. It is described by the Foundation as a maintenance release for the 3.6 series

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

This release is aimed at businesses and individual end users who prefer stability to more advanced features (those who want more advanced features can sample LibreOffice 4. Ed.). This new release is suited to the increasing number of organisations migrating to LibreOffice, which is steadily growing worldwide.

LibreOffice 3.6.6 is available for immediate download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are also available from the Extensions Centre.
WordPress Social Media widget hiding spam

11/04/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Two days ago, the Sicuri Blog reported a serious security problem with the Social Media widget for WordPress, one of the world’s most popular open source blogging platforms.

To quote:

If you are using the Social Media Widget plugin (social-media-widget), make sure to remove it immediately from your website. We discovered it is being used to inject spam into websites and it has also been removed from the WordPress Plugin repository.

This is a very popular plugin with more than 900,000 downloads. It has the potential to impact a lot of websites.

The plugin has a hidden call to this URL: httx://i.aaur.net/i.php, which is used to inject “Pay Day Loan” spam into the web sites running the plugin.

The authors report that the malicious code was added only 12 days ago when version 4.0 of the plug-in was released and The H Online IT news site reports that the package had a change of maintainers back in January this year.

Besides removing this particular widget, users are advised to find another plug-in to replace it.
Debian joins OPW

09/04/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech
The GNOME Foundation started the Free & Open Source Software Outreach Programme for Women, otherwise known as OPW, in 2010. Many other FOSS organisations joined the programme in the January-April 2013 round. Bits from Debian, the official blog of the Debian Project, announced yesterday that Debian will also be joining in the next round of OPW from June-September and offering one internship.

More details about Debian’s participation in the programme can be found on Debian’s dedicated OPW page.

OPW allows applicants to work on any kind of project, including coding, design, marketing and web development. The Debian Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects will also be offered as possible projects for OPW, but GSoC only allows coding projects. If potential participants have any idea of a non-coding project and want to mentor one, please contact Debian on the soc-coordination mailing list adding [OPW] in subject line.

OPW works in the same way as GSoC except there’s no Google involvement. The same advice that is provided for GSoC mentors works for OPW mentors.

The main goal of OPW is to increase the number of women in FOSS, so all women who are not yet Debian developers or maintainers are encouraged to apply. There are no age restrictions and applicants don’t have to be students.

Applicants need to take the following 3 steps:
- Choose a project from this list. There are actually two lists, one for GSoC and another with non-coding tasks that can be only offered by the OPW. Those lists may change over the next few weeks.
- Make a small contribution to Debian. Projects will add a task the applicant must complete as part of the pre-selection process. If no task is provided, you are welcome to ask the mentors of the project. You can also make a different extra task of the one listed to show your skills and interest.
- Create a page on the Debian wiki with your application. Applicants may use a pseudonym, but in that case, please give Debian about yourself privately by email to the coordinators listed on the Debian OPW page.
This is a repost from Bristol Wireless.
Hollyweb? Tell the W3C no thanks!

05/04/2013 Steve WoodsMedia, Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

According to its website, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where its member organisations, a full-time staff and the public work together to develop web standards, whose mission is to lead the Web to its full potential.

These standards have so far been characterised by complete openness: all web standards are open standards.

However, these open standards are now under attack.

There’s a proposal currently before the W3C’s HTML5 Working Group to build DRM (aka Digital Restrictions Management by openistas. Ed.) into the next generation of core web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions or EME.

The people behind EME are the major media companies; having failed to push such illiberal measures as SOPA and PIPA through the US legislature, the Big Media moguls are now going through non-governmental channels to try to sneak digital restrictions into every interaction people have online.

Hollyweb? No thanks, W3C!

Netflix, Google, Microsoft and the BBC are all rallying behind this ludicrous proposal, which – as stated above – flies in the face of the W3C’s mission.

However, a petition has already been set up to oppose the addition of DRM to HTML5 and 3rd May 2013 has been designated the International Day Against DRM.

The petition page is also available in French.

I’d urge everyone interested in open standards and all other forms of openness – such as open data and open source – to sign the petition; I’ve already done so.

This article is reposted with some minor amendments from Bristol Wireless.
Surveillance state: coming to a recycling centre near you?

01/04/2013 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

ANPR camera, now added to B&NES recycling centres
Well, it is if you happen to be (un)fortunate enough to live in the unitary authority of Bath & Northeast Somerset (aka B&NES), according to the BBC news website.

The council has installed ANPR cameras at its 3 recycling centres at Pixash in Keynsham Midland Road in Bath and Old Welton in Radstock to prevent callers from outside the district from using the facilities.

It has informed residents of the move via its website, as follows:

From 2 April 2013 you will need a FREE electronic Recycling Centre Resident’s Permit. You will not be able to use any of three our Recycling Centres with out [sic] this.

According to the council, the move is necessary as it could not afford to subsidise the cost of disposing of waste belonging to people who live elsewhere. The council also states somewhat disingenuously that residents’ council tax pays for them to dispose of their recycling, but somehow omits to state that the council earns income from selling stuff that can be recycled.

Nevertheless, it is asking its residents to sacrifice their privacy – and hence their liberty – to recycle or dispose of domestic waste.

Benjamin Franklin had something to say about sacrificing liberty. Writing in 1775, he stated:

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

A loss of liberty to save a few bob on the rates? 🙁 Whatever next?
Online dictionary Linguee adds new languages

27/03/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Tech

Canada’s La Presse reports that Linguee has just launched new language pairs – German-English, Spanish-French and Portuguese-French – for its online dictionary.

Since its creation Linguee has recorded more than a million search requests from around the world. For the Linguee team the application can be very useful within a professional, academic or private context to understand the contents of an email or a text in a foreign language, as well as current expressions, technical terms or the usual wording of greetings or salutations.

According to Linguee’s founder and CEO Gereon Frahling, its “servers have roamed the internet and have analysed and evaluated billions of multi-lingual texts”.

Hat tip: Richard McCarthy
Today is Document Freedom Day

27/03/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Tech

The last day of March each year is Document Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of open standards for document and information exchange.

In 30 countries around the world, activists from more than 50 groups are hosting events from Brussels to Nicaragua to Taiwan.

DFD – an annual celebration of open standards

Open standards are crucial to ensure that different computer systems can work together and users can access documents irrespective of the computing platform or device they use.

Sam Tuke, Campaign Manager at the Free Software Foundation Europe said: “Markets for digital products such as audio books and cloud documents have grown dramatically. Open standards let users break free from vendor lock-in and corporate control.”

This year’s campaign focuses on web-streaming technologies, such as Adobe’s closed, proprietary and insecure Flash. “This time, we are encouraging people to switch to HTML5 technologies,” said FSFE Community Manager Erik Albers.

Do you use open document formats? Examples include HTML (what the web is built upon), Open Document Format (the native file format used by office suites such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice), PDF and plain text (.txt).
Weak crypto keys in NetBSD

25/03/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

A serious error has occurred in the random number generator in free Unix derivative NetBSD, which can result in the system’s cryptographic keys being too weak and allowing them to be cracked, German IT news website Heise reports. The cause is misplaced brackets in the program code of the NetBSD kernel. The developers have made a kernel update available to preclude the problem in future. In addition, they are recommending that users of keys produced with either NetBSD 6.0 or the current version of NetBSD change these as a matter of urgency.

The programming error can result in the system producing random numbers which are not particularly random. This danger is especially great if the system is just booting as the system has very little entropy available at this time. The problem has particularly serious effects on 32 bit platforms where cryptographic keys containing only some 32 bits entropy are produced under these circumstances. The resulting 4 billion possibilities can be tried in turn. NetBSD 6.1 will remedy the error.

In particular, keys for SSH servers (which are normally produced at system start-up) are definitely affected. All SSH server keys which have been produced on NetBSD 6 systems should be changed as a matter of urgency. Since the ECDSA algorithm was first introduced with version 6, the relevant keys are very likely to be weak.

Full details of the problem can be found in this NetBSD security advisory notice.
Ubuntu Kylin is to become reference system in China

24/03/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

According to German IT news website Heise, the Chinese Ministry for Industry & Information Technology has selected Ubuntu as the basis for its reference architecture for operating systems. The China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre (CSIP), part of the Industry & IT Ministry, Ubuntu manufacturer Canonical and the Chinese National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) are working to adapt the Chinese Kylin variant of Ubuntu to the requirements of the Chinese markets under the aegis of the CCN Open Source Innovation Joint Lab.

Ubuntu Kylin is to appear in April this year together with Ubuntu 13.04 with support for the input of Chinese symbols and the Chinese calendar and will integrate Chinese web services. The integration of Baidu Maps, the Chinese Amazon competitor Taobao, payment processes for Chinese banks and Chinese timetables and flight schedules is planned for subsequent versions. In addition, the WPS office suite, which is popular in China, is to be adapted for Kylin.

Ubuntu Kylin is to be widely used as the reference for a flexible, open operating system. The announcement of is part of a Chinese five year plan which should promote the use of open source software and speed up the development of an open source ecosystem.

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